buy (co-own) it. $3 a mo. to maintain it. Any leftover funds can go to the two or three Bernie initiatives (Our Revolution).

This site has six moderators in addition to the two administrators here, JtC and Joe. Moderation is only a part of what JtC does. As the admin, he screens all the new accounts and maintains the system's operating capacities. In addition, if a user refuses to comply with the moderator's warning to act civilly, only JtC and Joe have the ability to disable that user's account. We all have to realize the JtC built this site from the ground up on his own time because he believed in the mission of what a small group wanted to be able to do. This is his baby and he feels an enormous responsibility for it. He is not being compensated for it and it is draining his time away from his own business as well as his family.

While I do not want to see JtC sell this place, I understand why he feels he must do it. It has become a full time job with no pay. At some point, any reasonable human being must make a choice.

that was a pretty moving post, straight from the heart, and you received a number of positive responses (but also quite a few flames). And that was a pretty early post (February 2016, if I am not mistaken?).

Much has happened since then. The Democratic primary "elections" clearly were stolen; the Repugnant primaries probably less so(!!). The $hill now is in charge, and is marshaling her minions to move the discourse in the US even further toward the Right (Insane) Wing. In some respects, The Donald appears to be more reasonable than does The $hill.

What a world (as The WWW -- Wicked Witch of the West -- stated). The $hill is committed to running as a Repug (and a truly nasty one, at that - Nixon & The $hill will have the distinction of retaining an indicted war criminal -- Kissinger -- as an honored advisor). Based on his stated positions, The Donald seems to be leaning toward running as a Democrat (when he isn't running as an inmate of Bedlam).

One of the themes of your wonderful article on TOP was discrimination as a woman mechanic in the Air Force and the fact that you would not fall for false feminism in Hillary to allow the continued march of the 1% to control more and more

Well, here is something different, really different.

This is from philosophy and I always say up front that even trying to understand this stuff for 40 years it is still a daily struggle

A tweet today from the effort of the French polymath Bruno Latour brought up 2 books.

In Bruno Latour's metaphics, humans and non human actors are on the stage. Expecially from Kant, human access, human determination of everything has been primary.

With Bruno we now notice that carbon dioxide is a major political actor, not mere stuff to be pushed around.

In any case here are the two books. (Hint - have you felt that you have been ignored like a stone???)

Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman

Stone maps the force, vivacity, and stories within our most mundane matter, stone. For too long stone has served as an unexamined metaphor for the “really real”: blunt factuality, nature’s curt rebuke. Yet, medieval writers knew that stones drop with fire from the sky, emerge through the subterranean lovemaking of the elements, tumble along riverbeds from Eden, partner with the masons who build worlds with them. Such motion suggests an ecological enmeshment and an almost creaturely mineral life.

Although geological time can leave us reeling, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that stone’s endurance is also an invitation to apprehend the world in other than human terms. Never truly inert, stone poses a profound challenge to modernity’s disenchantments. Its agency undermines the human desire to be separate from the environment, a bifurcation that renders nature “out there,” a mere resource for recreation, consumption, and exploitation.

Written with great verve and elegance, this pioneering work is notable not only for interweaving the medieval and the modern but also as a major contribution to ecotheory. Comprising chapters organized by concept —“Geophilia,” “Time,” “Force,” and “Soul”—Cohen seamlessly brings together a wide range of topics including stone’s potential to transport humans into nonanthropocentric scales of place and time, the “petrification” of certain cultures, the messages fossils bear, the architecture of Bordeaux and Montparnasse, Yucca Mountain and nuclear waste disposal, the ability of stone to communicate across millennia in structures like Stonehenge, and debates over whether stones reproduce and have souls.

Showing that what is often assumed to be the most lifeless of substances is, in its own time, restless and forever in motion, Stone fittingly concludes by taking us to Iceland⎯a land that, writes the author, “reminds us that stone like water is alive, that stone like water is transient.”

and the second book

The Planet in a Pebble: A journey into Earth's deep history

This is the story of a single pebble. It is just a normal pebble, as you might pick up on holiday - on a beach in Wales, say. Its history, though, carries us into abyssal depths of time, and across the farthest reaches of space.

This is a narrative of the Earth's long and dramatic history, as gleaned from a single pebble. It begins as the pebble-particles form amid unimaginable violence in distal realms of the Universe, in the Big Bang and in supernova explosions and continues amid the construction of the Solar System. Jan Zalasiewicz shows the almost incredible complexity present in such a small and apparently mundane object. Many events in the Earth's ancient past can be deciphered from a pebble: volcanic eruptions; the lives and deaths of extinct animals and plants; the alien nature of long-vanished oceans; and transformations deep underground, including the creations of fool's gold and of oil.

Zalasiewicz demonstrates how geologists reach deep into the Earth's past by forensic analysis of even the tiniest amounts of mineral matter. Many stories are crammed into each and every pebble around us. It may be small, and ordinary, this pebble - but it is also an eloquent part of our Earth's extraordinary, never-ending story.

From Bruno Latour's work I realized "No Issues, No Politics." Part of the revolution of the Bernie movement is putting issues on the table and we need to keep them there.

I realize that this is a strange comment, but part of my ongoing attempt to realize why humans are so stuck and keep doing such stupid things, especially full speed ahead to attack gaia.

When you first posted it and sharing it on FB. The comments I received on FB were much the same. "This is why we have to speak up". I agree, and that is why we need places like this to gather and speak out about things that are important to us. This is even more important now in the absence of journalists doing their jobs. We are now, each of us, citizen journalists informing our sphere of influence.

I've answered several of the calls for contributions, but know that a little bit monthly, taken out of my paypal or whatever automatically would probably add up to more, and would be less of an impact.